Joanne Mattera

Joanne Mattera works in a chromatically resonant and compositionally reductive style that she refers to as “lush minimalism.” She has had solo shows in New York City at the Stephen Haller Gallery (1995), OK Harris Works of Art (1996, 2007), and Odetta Gallery (2019), where her 35th career solo, From Dawn to Dusk, took place. She shows regularly with American Abstract Artists in New York City and elsewhere.

Writing and curating
In addition to her studio practice, Joanne writes regularly and curates occasionally. Her memoir, Vita: Growing Up Italian, Coming Out, and Making a Life in Art, was published in 2019 by Well-Fed Artist Press in New York City. In a recent interview with Deanna Sirlin in The Art Sectionshe reveals some additional biographical details. Through her Joanne Mattera Art Blog she reports on exhibitions and art fairs in New York City, Miami, and elsewhere.

Curatorial projects include Textility in 2012 at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey; Summit, which she produced with the institution’s curator, Mary Birmingham; A Few Conversations about Color at DM Contemporary in Manhattan in 2015; and Depth Perception in 2017 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Massachusetts, which she curated with Cherie Mittenthal in conjunction with the 11th International Encaustic Conference. In 2007 she curated Luxe, Calme, et Volupté , a meditation on visual pleasure, for Marcia Wood Gallery.

Collections
Joanne's work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Connecticut College Print Department; University Collections at the University of Albany; Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.; the U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.; and institutional and private collections internationally. Her work is included in Geoform, an international online project focused on contemporary geometric abstraction. An illustrated resume can be seen here.

Joanne is the founder and director emerita of the International Encaustic Conference, an event devoted to a contemporary medium with a historic past. Relatedly, she is the author of the first commercially published book on encaustic in half a century, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, 2001).

Joanne divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts.